Close Read: The Death of Queens

A Rwandan fugitive wanted for killing a Tutsi queen has been arrested in Uganda. His name is Idelphonse Nizeyimana, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has charged him with directing units that murdered many people during the genocide of the nineties, including Queen Rosalie Gicanda and, as the BBC put it, “several women who looked after” her. She was the ceremonial sort of queen, and she was more than eighty years old.

Elsewhere in Africa, in Guinea, political violence and violence against women are again entwined. From the Times:

Cellphone snapshots, ugly and hard to refute, are circulating here and feeding rage: they show that women were the particular targets of the Guinean soldiers who suppressed a political demonstration at a stadium here last week, with victims and witnesses describing rapes, beatings and acts of intentional humiliation.

The Times printed one of those photos, in which a woman, with her face obscured, apparently stripped of her clothes, is on the ground, surrounded by soldiers; you can see a pink garment crumpled in the dirt nearby. Human rights groups estimate that more than a hundred fifty people were killed, the Times reports,

But even more than the shootings, the attacks on women—horrific anywhere, but viewed with particular revulsion in Muslim countries like this one—appear to have traumatized the citizenry and hardened the opposition’s determination to force out the leader of the military junta, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara.

It’s striking that the Guineans are more upset about the rape than about the killings. In countries like Congo, rape is almost a routinized part of life in wartime. (As many as half a million women were raped in the Rwandan genocide.) In Guinea, at least, there’s still some expectation that this sort of thing can’t happen, and some outrage. Perhaps that is a kind of hopeful sign. “This time, a new stage has been reached,” Sidya Touré, a former prime minister, told the Times, adding,

Where could people get the idea to start raping women in broad daylight?

Where, indeed. In another reminder that both international arrest warrants and rape ought to be taken seriously, the Swiss are not lettingRoman Polanski out on bail: having dodged justice for thirty years, he’s viewed, unsurprisingly, as a flight risk.

It is only the contemplation of actual criminals that encourages any tolerance for Brett Favre. His new team beat the Packers last night, so the whole cycle of love, disappointment, frustration, and hate is well in motion. And grown men get caught in it. In the course of rhapsodizing about one play, a Monday Night Football commentator said,

Call it passion…Call it loving the game…Call it whatever you want. I call it Brett Favre.

Call it quite enough.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

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